


SSR Team 161 "The Amazons"

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe – Gender Changes, F/F, reference to risk of rape, sniper rifles do not fit in handbags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 03:09:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4003543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Are you trying to tell me," Colonel Phillips said, "that Agent Rogers just broke 400 men out of a Hydra facility on the off-chance that a captured SSR team might still have been alive in there?"</p>
<p>Well, if he wasn't going to mention Harriet Stark or her own involvement, Peggy wasn't either. "Apparently Barnes is her best friend from Brooklyn, sir."</p>
            </blockquote>





	SSR Team 161 "The Amazons"

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to beili, who helped me with some research that didn't make it in but was good background, and will probably make its way into something someday.

Abraham Erskine didn't particularly seem put out that his serum was only going to work on women, which was nice of him.

"There are many world traditions of warrior women," he said, "and a woman knows what it is to be weak, so she will not forget when she is strong."

Stella thought he was very sweet to say that, even if Becky would've said it was stupid. She folded her hands in her lap and tried not to think about the story of Judith, or the way Becky had held her hands and said _don't you dare tell me to go, don't you dare, I'll go if you want but don't – don't - I'm going to come back to you and I'll be here until the end and then they'll bury us right next to each other_.

 

She and Agent Carter got to the encampment a week after the reports started coming in about having lost contact with Team 37 near the Austrian border, presumed captured by Hydra.

"It's a crack team, but they're not special," Phillips informed Carter, in heated tones that everyone could hear through the tent walls, even if it was basic courtesy to pretend not to. "Just because Barnes and – "

Stella's knees gave out. She had to focus on her breathing, like she never got the serum, until Carter stepped out of the tent and saw her.

"Rogers?" She bent down, put a hand on Stella's shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"Team 37." Stella's voice cracked. "Phillips said _Barnes_. Is that Rebecca Barnes?"

Carter's mouth tightened. "You know her?"

"She's –" Stella heard herself make a noise that hurt coming out of her throat afterwards. "She's my best friend."

"I'm so sorry." Carter said after a moment, and then took a step away as Stella stood. "Rogers."

"Yeah," Stella said, and went to borrow a helmet, and a pack, and a gun.

Carter found her in the middle of sweet-talking a very stupid private, pulled her aside, and escorted her to Harriet Stark's plane.

Stark dropped her and Carter off outside the last known location coordinates of Team 37 right before they stopped transmitting. It wasn't far from the badly-disguised door of a Hydra base, and they took out of the perimeter guards pretty easily, considering Carter hit him with a rock hard enough that he passed out.

They found the prisoners pretty fast - that many men made a lot of noise – but not before they smelled them, or more accurately the open mass graves.

The living ones said they were from the 107th, mostly, though there were a few other units mixed in. 

Carter and Stella let out the ones they could, and then in the chaos Stella snuck away into the base. Carter'd be okay; her hair was covered by a helmet, and the uniform covered her figure, so they might not have even known she was a woman. The pick-up point was redundant since there were so many people, so she didn't bother to radio Stark.

The base was a warren of evacuating scientists and a lot of soldiers. Stella kept out of their way and ran. Maybe shot a few with looted energy-guns she got from other Hydra corpses. She didn't see any other women, and hoped Becky wasn't – violated. That she wasn't and hadn't suffered.

It took her five or six scientists – later, it would be a blur – asking about an American female prisoner to get a room number, and then there was Becky, strapped to a table, in an undershirt and with her arms uncovered, voice raw, _Agent Rebecca Barnes, 03-_

"Becky," she said, unstrapping her, "Becky, please –"

"Stella?" Becky blinked, barely focused, looked up at her.

"Let's get you outta here – " Stella's stomach was cold and heavy inside her as she helped Becky up.

"I thought you were flatter," Becky said, face buried into her neck.

Stella laughed, even if it sounded like a sob of relief and of horror, and started pushing them towards the door. "C'mon, we gotta get outta here."

Even Becky felt different now, pressed against her. She didn't know why she'd expected it to feel the same.

"What _happened_ to you?" Becky asked, as they passed through the door.

"It's all newspaper," Stella said.

 

 

"Are you trying to tell me," Colonel Phillips said, "that Agent Rogers just broke 400 men out of a Hydra facility on the off-chance that a captured SSR team might still have been alive in there?"

Well, if he wasn't going to mention Harriet Stark or her own involvement, Peggy wasn't either. "Apparently Barnes is her best friend from Brooklyn, sir."

He glared at her as though _she_ could do something about the rather obvious interpretation that Stella Rogers, like many other women in the service and indeed the SSR, was a Lesbian.

"If you think she's going to get a commendation," he began, and she pretended to cough into her hand to cover her smile. That was the thing about Rogers. She wouldn't care about the commendation, and they both knew it.

 

 

Rebecca Barnes, when Peggy finally met her, was on the tall side for a woman, full-figured, with a clenched jaw, dark circles under her eyes, and hands that didn't shake. She wore the SSR not-quite-uniform well, and kept looking at Rogers, flinching minutely, and looking away again, even though they sat with their sides pressed together.

"Given how effective you've proven on your own," Peggy said, a little giddy still with the familiar adventure-success of it, "and the loyalty that the Azzano rescuees are showing you, the SSR is prepared to field you with a small team, to go after Hydra on their own turf rather than as part of the clean-up after the standard Allied forces."

"What do you say, Becks?" Rogers said, leaning a little into Barnes, rather than looking at her. "You wanna go back into the jaws of war?" There was a tension to her, though, that said she knew she was asking something terrible.

"Nah," Barnes said, and stole Rogers's canteen off the table, taking a long swig. "But," she said, before Rogers's face could finish falling, "that slip of a girl who didn't know when to shut up? I'd follow her anywhere." She glanced up at Peggy, then, challenging. Peggy made sure her face was under control.

 

Harriet Stark pulled out all the stops for Rogers and Barnes, both the engineering and the flirtation ones. Stark wasn't very discriminating – _Don't you know there's a war on, and I'm the one making all the grenades?_ she'd said – but Peggy found it refreshing, really. There were so many cads out there, and Stark was as bad as all of them because her true love was engineering.

"Barnes," Stark said, "I've got this for you – high-precision scope, already tested, and a built-in slide rule set to its specs for you to do any necessary calculations. Plus some other internal changes that I think you'll like. Better than anything else the US Army's got to give you. And light enough you can carry it and a smaller gun. Need it field-tested, and you'll give me an honest evaluation."

Barnes looked at it, bit her lip, and shrugged. "I'll take it if you get Stella to take something."

Rogers was, naturally, stubborn. "I don't need anything," she said, jaw set. "Nothing special, anyway. The team I'm assigned to will need equipment just as much."

After three hours, Peggy was thinking of calling in Phillips just to give Rogers an order so she'd shut up and stop declining things – like Stark wouldn't outfit the rest of the team! – until Stark sighed, swore, and said, "What are you looking for, a damn bow and arrow?"

Rogers laughed. "I don't have the arm –" and then she fell silent, because she did have strength for that, now.

"No," she said finally.

Stark threw up her hands. "Fine. Fine." And then Rogers said, "What's this?"

She was touching a sheet of metal, about three-quarters inch thick, shaped like a fingernail, about six square feet.

"Oh, a vibranium alloy. I was looking into it as armor for a special class of tanks, but if you alloy it it loses all its special characteristics – stops deflecting, mostly, changes the resonance frequencies."

"If you re-coat it," Rogers said, "could I use it as a shield?"

Stark looked at it, evaluatingly. "Not that one, it doesn't work. But I can have it melted down and the vibranium extracted, and make something a little smaller and a lot more effective."

"Could you?" Rogers asked.

"Make it like a discus," Peggy said. "So it can be thrown. Offense and defense."

"I _like_ it," Stark said. 

 

The team was entirely people who'd been rescued from the Hydra base – who had reason to go after Hydra, knew their tactics, and were willing to follow a woman back into it when they didn't have to.

Rogers made it work. Made the team work, with Barnes behind her, pulling her up the way any good NCO would have done. Barnes was a good agent. Peggy was glad to have them both in the field, and frankly, they made a good team. Very Theban Band, though it would've ruined them both if she'd said it, and anyway Phillips had probably guessed and likely preferred having Rogers there doing the work than making mischief somewhere else.

_The Amazons,_ Falsworth liked to joke. _No use for us men, but damn good fighters._

He'd had a classical education, too. Peggy appreciated the joke, even though no one else did, but somehow the team ended up being called that anyway.

 

Barnes went down off the train and it ruined Rogers. She was a disaster, and she wasn't entitled to compensation for the loss, either. 

Peggy hugged her, and let her uniforms get soggy with Rogers's crying. 

Rogers wasn't beautiful when she cried, but then, few people are. She looked honest, like she always did. Like you were seeing down to the break in her heart.

 

She had been a frontovichka, she thought. There had been other women. And men. 

She was a soldier, she thought. 

She.

 

The ballerinas knew, from the way she spoke, old-fashioned and strange, that she had been one of the many successes of the science programs. She had probably fought in the last war, and for a time, Natalia admired her unvarnished skill in battle, and her patience. Her loyalty.

 

There was a SHIELD tag on any reports of planes being found in the North Atlantic containing the body of one Agent Stella Rogers. She had been one of the most decorated agents of the SSR, and they wanted to bring her body home for proper burial. 

They did a little more than that.

Toni Stark was an asshole, but Izzy Banner was all right until she turned into a giant green rage monster. 

"What's your bra made of?" Stella asked, gesturing to Izzy's chest. "I mean, it still fits when you get big." 

Izzy laughed, a little self-consciously, and ran a hand through her hair. "I –"

"It's just materials engineering, Wonder Woman, I mean," Toni interrupted, sounding like her mother, and Stella gave up.

 

"On your left," said the white girl who was running like she had jet-packs attached to her shoes.

"On my left, got it," Sam said. Miss Speedy over in front of her was gonna get tired sometime.

 

After Director Fury got shot three times through Stella's wall and started bleeding out on her floor, Stella didn't panic. Well, she did, a little, but she was used to that, knew how to work through it, and there was movement on the roof of the building next to hers, so she went after it. 

 

"I know who killed Fury," Natasha said, pressed up close between Stella and the wall. "Most of the intelligence community don't believe he exists. The ones that do call him the Winter Soldier. He's credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last 50 years."

"So he's a ghost story," Stella said.

"Five years ago, I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran. Somebody shot out my tires near Odessa. We lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out. But the Winter Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me. Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye-bye, bikinis."

"Yeah," Stella said, on an impulse, because Natasha already knew, "I bet you look terrible in 'em now."

Natasha glanced at her mouth, and this was _not_ the time for that, even if Stella hadn't, still, for Becky…

"I saw him," Stella said. "Metal armor on the left arm, red star on the bicep. About five-foot ten, hundred and eighty pounds. Long hair."

Natasha's face shifted. Her jaw clenched, relaxed. "That's why she's a ghost," she said.

"What?"

"The Winter Soldier's a woman," Natasha said. Her voice was rough. "You noticed the metal arm. You didn't notice she was a woman." She licked her lips. "You notice a man when you're looking for an assassin. You don't notice a woman carrying a big shopping bag."

"That's experience talking?" Stella said, but she remembered that. Becky had done it all the time. They'd pretend to be locals, if it was a large enough town they could get away with it, scout in borrowed skirts giggling together and nobody noticed if their handbags had guns in them unless they were already suspicious.

"Yeah," Natasha said, and they looked at each other in mutual understanding.

 

She waited to have a breakdown until after Hill helped them out of Hydra's keeping, until she and Sam and Natasha were at the dam and Fury had proved she was alive and Becky – she – Becky –

Her brain kept skipping like a record. Becky falling, Becky's secretive smile, Becky's arm holding a knife, Becky's long hair – she had always been so proud of her hair, and Stella had always liked how it felt smooth against her fingers even though it curled and knotted against itself – the steady sound of her breathing as they fought, the way she'd said _Who the fuck is Becky_ like she hadn't been called that all the days of her life, like Stella hadn't whispered it into her throat and between her breasts and into her stomach and. 

Then Stella picked herself up, like she did before Azzano, and went to rescue her best girl again, and stop Hydra while she and her friends were at it.


End file.
